The Bristol sound is back - and what a thrilling resurgence. Between them, Tricky's Knowle West Boy and Portishead's Third reflect both the bleakness and industrial decay of my favourite city's less salubrious environs. But for me, there's a gaping hole in this renaissance.

While the second generation of Bristol soundsters are deservedly getting plaudits, the first-generation key originator has been almost sidelined. In fact, Mark Stewart's new album Edit and the subsequent European tour slipped below almost every reviewer's radar. It's easy to fall into the paranoid mindset residual in the Bristol sound: so few have heard Mark Stewart and the Maffia's strident call to Rise Again because THEY don't want the masses to be politicised into revolt. (Though more mundanely, it comes down to Stewart's label, the German indie Crippled Dick Hot Wax, lacking the promotional clout of his Bristolian counterparts). Screaming that "we are all prostitutes, everyone has their price, everyone" with The Pop Group and "you too will learn to live a lie" (reverberating around clubland in emasculated form as a house remake), Stewart is one of very few to have had the gall to articulate the desires of the poor huddled masses struggling to break free, and also hold a mirror to our hypocrisy: we're all consumers, we're all guilty ... now what are we going to do about it? Margaret Thatcher declared there was no such thing as society. Mark Stewart countered that we were all in the same sinking ship and it was time to storm the captain's table. If anyone's looking for an antidote soundtrack to Maggie's forthcoming state funeral, dig out the complete works of Mark Stewart, starting with the Pop Group's For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder?, a raw, emotive response to their sinister new government. As FACT Magazine's retrospective appraisal of the Pop Group reminds us, while the debut expressionist album Y and its primeval hit She Is Beyond Good and Evil was about Stewart as Prometheus, the bringer of fire, for the second album "they now sought to wake up their audience instead of teaching them new ways to dream." True, Bristolian music-makers haven't forgotten their debts to their progenitor - Massive Attack included him in June's Meltdown festival, while Tricky has said "Mark Stewart: he is my chaos". But beyond that, mention Stewart - and On-U Sound and Adrian Sherwood, his collaborators since 1981 - and you'll likely receive the same bemused stare from your indie record retailer as I did. It's been five years since the hamstrung On-U Sound got a release out, or even one from its outstanding back catalogue, much to Sherwood's frustration. While Grandmaster Flash and Melle Mel's White Lines remains a dancefloor staple, the trio that formed Sugarhill Records' house band is still Stewart's Maffia. It was Mark Stewart and Sherwood who persuaded New York's Keith Leblanc, Doug Wimbish and Skip McDonald to work in collision with British dub outcasts and agit-prop funksters to produce such fierce politico gems as Tackhead's Hard Left, and Mark Stewart and the Maffia's As The Veneer Of Democracy Begins To Fade. In a recent interview in Japan - where his and On-U Sound's popularity has never dipped - Stewart dismissed the notion of fans. Raising his fist, he declared: "For me it's more comrades-in-arms ... it's simpatico, people who believe in the same idea." And in this prevalent void where so little of political meaning is being expounded through music, we need Mark Stewart and anthems such as Blessed Are Those Who Struggle and Hysteria more than ever. This November, the documentary On/Off is due for DVD release, the first to trace Mark Stewart's extraordinary and fragmented career. In it, the manic Bristolian - described by Nick Cave as "totally in your face" - explains his modus operandi: "For three years I'll go left from the music business, and hang out with my friends who are builders. I'll just be hooligan and normal and come back when I'm interested." We should be interested too. Mark Stewart and the Maffia deserve their dues, most evidently for the existence of Massive Attack, Portishead and Tricky. And the question he posed in 1980 remains: how much longer DO we tolerate mass murder?